It's very easy to do on unix, i have scripts to do exactly that.. Ofcourse i install it on a test machine first, and when verified to work i push the changes out over all the other machines using an automated script.
The difference is that linux distributions include third party extras, and includes a choice of apps including the choice of not installing them atall.. microsoft give you no choice and include only their own extras. If microsoft included a freeware cd with their os that included a large choice of free software i doubt people would complain.
But while a low-paid monkey may be able to configure windows and get it performing the job it's intended to, the same monkey could equally configure something such as mandrake with little difficulty, people are just afraid of trying new things..
Aside from that, the low-paid monkey will not configure the system in a performant or secure manner, so you are likely to end up with a system that's insecure, unstable and performs poorly.. As we discovered recently, setting windows up in a secure manner is a much more complicated than doing the same with unix, and there are always new undocumented ways around whatever security measures you put in place. Contrast this with unix, where the system is very simple and modular at it's core compared to windows. Actually employing someone capable of running either system properly will be very expensive.
And hopefully as the customers become more savvy, the lockin will become bad for vendors too and we will see an end to intentional incompatibility and vendor lock-in.
There are free bios's (linuxbios for instance) that can boot linux, linux can also boot on systems with other firmware such as sun openfirmware or digital srm.. On the other hand, linux requires HARDWARE to run on, which is also non-free. The bios is FIRMWARE.. perhaps it has some justification for being non-free seeing as it's integrated into the hardware which will always be non-free. The hardware business is not a scam like the software business, there is ALWAYS a cost for producing hardware, raw materials etc, and hardware usually becomes cheaper once the initial development costs are covered, unlike software.
You dont have to atall, that's the microsoft mentality.. I run current versions of linux on my workstations that were built in 1998 and 1996 respectively, they run just fine and i've no need to replace them. Replacement parts and upgrades are available cheaply on ebay if i so choose. I have a mac running OSX 10.4 tiger aswell (latest right now), it's dual 450mhz G4 but i'm not sure how old it is, tho it's definately not current hardware.
I couldn't tollerate using an os where you can't update the os and it's packages seperately.. All the major linux distributions let you do this, aswell as the BSD's.. If you have a lot of apps installed, hunting round for updates is a huge pain in the ass, and how do you even know if updates are available? you have to keep checking 50 websites on a regular basis to check for updates. And then in a misguided attempt to solve this problem, lots of apps include their own self-update tools which run in the background all the time and become a major hinderance.
Games.... Networked games, especially lan games, generate a lot of traffic and games need all the processing power they can get, you dont want your nic sucking up a chunk of it.... I remember dialup quake players with winmodems had much higher pings than players with real modems, even if those real modem users had much slower processors.
I also hate Dell machines with a passion, but i do have to disagree with your complaints about their processor fans.. That's the one thing they did right, a fan which draws air from outside the case and blasts it over the cpu and out the case again is good.. Much more effective than one which recirculates the already warm air from inside the case. A lot of highend machines use a similar fan arrangement to dell's, the only problem as i see it, is that standard sized motherboards don't put the cpu in the same place every time so it's not possible to setup the fan like this so easily.
Onboard NIC's tend to be poor quality ones like realtek chips.. These chips have the minimal hardware and the rest of the nic functions are emulated in software, which results in much higher cpu load and inferior performance compared to a proper hardware nic.
Dell did some benchmarks a few years ago, between redhat and windows systems running on their hardware.. Their benchmarks showed a considerable advantage for redhat, and a hardware vendor has more to gain from showing the maximum possible performance from their hardware, rather than making a particular software stack look poor.. Tho dell are still too microsoft-centric for my liking, which makes it even more interesting that their benchmarks showed an advantage for redhat.
They also failed to mention that Apache supports AES encryption with cipher strengths of 128 and 256-bit, which is much stronger (tho not sure of performance) compared to anything IIS supports.
An equally fair benchmark would be comparing AES-256 ssl speeds on both platforms, with IIS scoring 0 for dropping all the requests.
Openoffice 2 is a lot better, but both it and msoffice are still horrendously buggy.. Both need to concentrating on fixing bugs rather than adding new features.. Aside from that openoffice is better in many ways, mainly due to it's flexibility (including the open file format, which is easily edited outside of openoffice and can be modified by automated tools) and cross-platform nature (i find X11 configured with a window manager to suit me is far more productive than windows or osx).. One thing i find especially usefull however, is the open nature of the openoffice fileformat.. Instead of being stuck with a single macro-language, i can write my own scripts in any language to parse and modify the files, i can even generate or modify documents through web-based interfaces for instance.
That's also an issue with blackberry being inflexible.. They should make a product which runs ontop of standard protocols (imap, pop3 etc) instead of integrating into propriatory backend systems.. That way you just need to write and support one connector instead of one for each backend.. Aside from that, blackberry shouldn't really be promoting exchange, ms are actively trying to compete against blackberry and will quite happily drive them bankrupt if they can.
Because the drop-outs do a poor job, and end up with poorly running spyware/virus infested networks.. Sure, someone clueless *can* run a windows network, but they don't do a very good job of it.. Securing windows to the extent required to prevent the students and internet nasties making mincemeat of the network is actually MUCH HARDER than doing the same on a unix platform. You have to disable a lot of core functionality of the os because it's flawed and insecure, you have to heavily restrict apps like word because they have the ability to execute arbitrary programs via ole objects or macros etc - you dont want students running command prompts or arbitrary apps they downloaded.. Aside from that, as the demand for non-ms admins increases, so will the supply, as people will see it as a lucrative business to move into.
I hate openoffice as much as anyone, it's incredibly buggy bloated and slow.. But unfortunately, so are the alternatives.. Nothing has 100% compatibility with word docs, not even word itself between versions. There are many bugs in any office suite available today, one particular bug in word to do with macro line counting when you have bullet points has gone unfixed since 1997, and theres many more.
On the other hand, openoffice is making rapid progress, which is more than ms is.. There is a place to report bugs and then you can track the status as your bug report is investigated, confirmed by other people and eventually fixed. The more people who are affected by the bug, and vote for it in the bug tracking system, the sooner the developers will look at implementing a fix for it. The bug tracking system is very similar to what mozilla uses, and not long ago people were saying mozilla was bloated buggy and unuseable, now look at firefox.. Openoffice is likely to go the same way, more likely infact because people have more to gain from openoffice than they do from mozilla... And as for incompatibility, once office packages implementing the opendocument formats gain a significant percentage of the market, compatibility will become far less of an issue and eventually be reversed since ms doesn't support the open formats.
Well, schools often get a lot more than 50% discount, but it's still a lot expensive more than free. And you can get hardware brand new for quite a bit less than you stated too, so the software cost is still a sizeable chunk. Infact a lowend machine nowadays will actually cost less than the software running on it even if you just have windows+office.
Not atall, while it's certainly better than locking people in to a propriatory vendor, the world is a diverse place and that's how kids should be taught. If you want to teach someone how to word process, dont teach them how to use a single app, teach them with multiple different apps that achieve the same end-goal, teach them how to use the help when they get stuck, teach them how to look through the menus to find what they're looking for. The biggest problem nowadays is that people learn particular programs and instead of learning what theyre looking for, just learn the exact location of it and don't realise how to search through menus or helpfiles. This is why you have people who get stuck when their systems are upgraded or migrated.
Here in the UK, there are very few apples in schools, we had Acorns, and before that BBC computers.. In my senior school, the design/graphics department had some macs, but there were no apple machines of any kind to be found anywhere else in the school. We learned on a combination of RiscOS (acorn) BBC BASIC, DOS, MacOS (6 i think) and windows 3.x. No-one seemed to have any problem switching between the different platforms, and many of us used amiga's, commodore 64's or sinclairs at home just to add to the mix. Consequently while i do have my platforms of choice, i can adapt to new programs reasonably quickly.. I was unable to learn the location of menu options by repetition, i had to learn what i was looking for and what it does, so that when i went to use a new app i had to navigate it's different menu system or read the help to find what i needed.
But school computers are often setup in the most restrictive way the school staff could manage, and the holes in their security are furthur enforced by punishments if your caught breaching it.. The restrictive environments don't encourage learning about the guts of the machine atall, they may teach you the bare minimum of how to operate the exact word processing configuration present on the machines. People learn parrot-fashion how to use (not find) the options theyre told they need. Me, i was banned from the school computer lab for breaking through their restrictions and accessing a dos prompt, now i'm paid pretty good money as a security consultant doing penetration-testing where i'm SUPPOSED to break security.
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It's very easy to do on unix, i have scripts to do exactly that.. Ofcourse i install it on a test machine first, and when verified to work i push the changes out over all the other machines using an automated script.
The difference is that linux distributions include third party extras, and includes a choice of apps including the choice of not installing them atall.. microsoft give you no choice and include only their own extras. If microsoft included a freeware cd with their os that included a large choice of free software i doubt people would complain.
But while a low-paid monkey may be able to configure windows and get it performing the job it's intended to, the same monkey could equally configure something such as mandrake with little difficulty, people are just afraid of trying new things..
Aside from that, the low-paid monkey will not configure the system in a performant or secure manner, so you are likely to end up with a system that's insecure, unstable and performs poorly..
As we discovered recently, setting windows up in a secure manner is a much more complicated than doing the same with unix, and there are always new undocumented ways around whatever security measures you put in place. Contrast this with unix, where the system is very simple and modular at it's core compared to windows.
Actually employing someone capable of running either system properly will be very expensive.
And hopefully as the customers become more savvy, the lockin will become bad for vendors too and we will see an end to intentional incompatibility and vendor lock-in.
You can even sell it if you want to, providing you supply the sourcecode and a copy of the GPL with it.
There are free bios's (linuxbios for instance) that can boot linux, linux can also boot on systems with other firmware such as sun openfirmware or digital srm..
On the other hand, linux requires HARDWARE to run on, which is also non-free.
The bios is FIRMWARE.. perhaps it has some justification for being non-free seeing as it's integrated into the hardware which will always be non-free. The hardware business is not a scam like the software business, there is ALWAYS a cost for producing hardware, raw materials etc, and hardware usually becomes cheaper once the initial development costs are covered, unlike software.
Really? Photoshop seems to work quite well on my mac.. And older versions ran (poorly) on sgi workstations aswell.
You dont have to atall, that's the microsoft mentality.. I run current versions of linux on my workstations that were built in 1998 and 1996 respectively, they run just fine and i've no need to replace them.
Replacement parts and upgrades are available cheaply on ebay if i so choose.
I have a mac running OSX 10.4 tiger aswell (latest right now), it's dual 450mhz G4 but i'm not sure how old it is, tho it's definately not current hardware.
I couldn't tollerate using an os where you can't update the os and it's packages seperately.. All the major linux distributions let you do this, aswell as the BSD's..
If you have a lot of apps installed, hunting round for updates is a huge pain in the ass, and how do you even know if updates are available? you have to keep checking 50 websites on a regular basis to check for updates.
And then in a misguided attempt to solve this problem, lots of apps include their own self-update tools which run in the background all the time and become a major hinderance.
Games.... Networked games, especially lan games, generate a lot of traffic and games need all the processing power they can get, you dont want your nic sucking up a chunk of it.... I remember dialup quake players with winmodems had much higher pings than players with real modems, even if those real modem users had much slower processors.
I also hate Dell machines with a passion, but i do have to disagree with your complaints about their processor fans.. That's the one thing they did right, a fan which draws air from outside the case and blasts it over the cpu and out the case again is good.. Much more effective than one which recirculates the already warm air from inside the case. A lot of highend machines use a similar fan arrangement to dell's, the only problem as i see it, is that standard sized motherboards don't put the cpu in the same place every time so it's not possible to setup the fan like this so easily.
My audigy board works just fine in this dual opteron workstation, what's supposed to be the issue with it?
Onboard NIC's tend to be poor quality ones like realtek chips.. These chips have the minimal hardware and the rest of the nic functions are emulated in software, which results in much higher cpu load and inferior performance compared to a proper hardware nic.
Plus bundling extra hardware costs the bundler extra money for every item shipped, unlike with software..
Dell did some benchmarks a few years ago, between redhat and windows systems running on their hardware.. Their benchmarks showed a considerable advantage for redhat, and a hardware vendor has more to gain from showing the maximum possible performance from their hardware, rather than making a particular software stack look poor.. Tho dell are still too microsoft-centric for my liking, which makes it even more interesting that their benchmarks showed an advantage for redhat.
They also failed to mention that Apache supports AES encryption with cipher strengths of 128 and 256-bit, which is much stronger (tho not sure of performance) compared to anything IIS supports.
An equally fair benchmark would be comparing AES-256 ssl speeds on both platforms, with IIS scoring 0 for dropping all the requests.
Openoffice 2 is a lot better, but both it and msoffice are still horrendously buggy.. Both need to concentrating on fixing bugs rather than adding new features..
Aside from that openoffice is better in many ways, mainly due to it's flexibility (including the open file format, which is easily edited outside of openoffice and can be modified by automated tools) and cross-platform nature (i find X11 configured with a window manager to suit me is far more productive than windows or osx).. One thing i find especially usefull however, is the open nature of the openoffice fileformat.. Instead of being stuck with a single macro-language, i can write my own scripts in any language to parse and modify the files, i can even generate or modify documents through web-based interfaces for instance.
That's also an issue with blackberry being inflexible.. They should make a product which runs ontop of standard protocols (imap, pop3 etc) instead of integrating into propriatory backend systems..
That way you just need to write and support one connector instead of one for each backend..
Aside from that, blackberry shouldn't really be promoting exchange, ms are actively trying to compete against blackberry and will quite happily drive them bankrupt if they can.
Because the drop-outs do a poor job, and end up with poorly running spyware/virus infested networks..
Sure, someone clueless *can* run a windows network, but they don't do a very good job of it.. Securing windows to the extent required to prevent the students and internet nasties making mincemeat of the network is actually MUCH HARDER than doing the same on a unix platform. You have to disable a lot of core functionality of the os because it's flawed and insecure, you have to heavily restrict apps like word because they have the ability to execute arbitrary programs via ole objects or macros etc - you dont want students running command prompts or arbitrary apps they downloaded..
Aside from that, as the demand for non-ms admins increases, so will the supply, as people will see it as a lucrative business to move into.
I hate openoffice as much as anyone, it's incredibly buggy bloated and slow..
But unfortunately, so are the alternatives.. Nothing has 100% compatibility with word docs, not even word itself between versions. There are many bugs in any office suite available today, one particular bug in word to do with macro line counting when you have bullet points has gone unfixed since 1997, and theres many more.
On the other hand, openoffice is making rapid progress, which is more than ms is.. There is a place to report bugs and then you can track the status as your bug report is investigated, confirmed by other people and eventually fixed. The more people who are affected by the bug, and vote for it in the bug tracking system, the sooner the developers will look at implementing a fix for it.
The bug tracking system is very similar to what mozilla uses, and not long ago people were saying mozilla was bloated buggy and unuseable, now look at firefox.. Openoffice is likely to go the same way, more likely infact because people have more to gain from openoffice than they do from mozilla...
And as for incompatibility, once office packages implementing the opendocument formats gain a significant percentage of the market, compatibility will become far less of an issue and eventually be reversed since ms doesn't support the open formats.
Well, schools often get a lot more than 50% discount, but it's still a lot expensive more than free. And you can get hardware brand new for quite a bit less than you stated too, so the software cost is still a sizeable chunk. Infact a lowend machine nowadays will actually cost less than the software running on it even if you just have windows+office.
Well, both the windows and macos machines could quite happily dual boot with linux for no extra cost.
Not atall, while it's certainly better than locking people in to a propriatory vendor, the world is a diverse place and that's how kids should be taught. If you want to teach someone how to word process, dont teach them how to use a single app, teach them with multiple different apps that achieve the same end-goal, teach them how to use the help when they get stuck, teach them how to look through the menus to find what they're looking for.
The biggest problem nowadays is that people learn particular programs and instead of learning what theyre looking for, just learn the exact location of it and don't realise how to search through menus or helpfiles. This is why you have people who get stuck when their systems are upgraded or migrated.
Here in the UK, there are very few apples in schools, we had Acorns, and before that BBC computers.. In my senior school, the design/graphics department had some macs, but there were no apple machines of any kind to be found anywhere else in the school. We learned on a combination of RiscOS (acorn) BBC BASIC, DOS, MacOS (6 i think) and windows 3.x. No-one seemed to have any problem switching between the different platforms, and many of us used amiga's, commodore 64's or sinclairs at home just to add to the mix. Consequently while i do have my platforms of choice, i can adapt to new programs reasonably quickly.. I was unable to learn the location of menu options by repetition, i had to learn what i was looking for and what it does, so that when i went to use a new app i had to navigate it's different menu system or read the help to find what i needed.
But school computers are often setup in the most restrictive way the school staff could manage, and the holes in their security are furthur enforced by punishments if your caught breaching it.. The restrictive environments don't encourage learning about the guts of the machine atall, they may teach you the bare minimum of how to operate the exact word processing configuration present on the machines. People learn parrot-fashion how to use (not find) the options theyre told they need.
Me, i was banned from the school computer lab for breaking through their restrictions and accessing a dos prompt, now i'm paid pretty good money as a security consultant doing penetration-testing where i'm SUPPOSED to break security.